Is It Possible to Live on Mars or are we INSANE? (ft. Adam Becker)

They don't see that as the problem. They think, oh, this is the only example of advanced life in the entire universe. And so therefore, it's really, really important that we get off of this planet in order to secure a future out in space. They say it's more important than anything else. It's more important than preserving the environment here. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than civil rights. They also overlook that space is pretty bad for humans to live.

This is the best place we've got.

We're going to a lot about what I call the eschatology, the end times fantasies of tech billionaires, some of whom have been on the show and I've talked to in the past, including people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Let's open with something that's really been a hot topic lately, which is the potential for AI Boom or AI Doom. In this book, you come down relatively hard on the billionaires that are not only shaping our economy through their inventions or technology, but also on their desire for control, manipulation, power, and perhaps even, as you call it, a threat to democracy.

Yeah.

What is going on with AI? How do you see it now? And, and, and what do you really see as the number one danger the audience would be, you know, keen to pay attention to, if not panic? Let us know when we should start panicking.

Sure, yeah. So, you know, like you said, there's the AI boomers who think that, you know, like a lot of these billionaires who, like Andreessen specifically is a great example, who think that really we just need to make AI go as fast as possible, scale up as big as possible as quickly as possible, and it will solve all of our problems for us. And then on the other side, you have these AI doomers, people like this guy Eliezer Yudkowski, who I think we're probably going to talk about a bit more as we go on, and also the effective altruists, people from the same camp as, like, Sam Bankman, Fried, or if we want to pick a currently active tech billionaire, Dustin Moskovitz, who believe that AI in all likelihood is going to lead to, you know, total extinction of humanity and the end of the world. I think that the evidence for either of these claims is pretty bad because they're, in a lot of ways are two sides of the same coin. And the reason I say that, even though their claims sound as far apart as possible, is that they're both predicated on this idea that AI is going to inevitably and in pretty short order become incredibly powerful and superhuman in not just its abilities, but in its intelligence and. And just be more powerful and more intelligent and more capable than all of the rest of humanity and human civilization combined.

Super intelligence.

Right, exactly. And then that will lead to it being able to do whatever it wants with like godlike powers of creation and destruction. I think the arguments in favor of that happening are pretty bad and the arguments against it are pretty good. So I think both the boomers and the doomers are sort of living in the same fantasy land and they're both wrong. And that the biggest dangers we have around AI are the sort of normal dangers that we have around technology. Right. That it'll be used to further concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few without democratic accountability. That it will take existing problems in society and make them worse, existing biases and make them worse.

And we're already seeing all of that happen. So I think it's just going to be more of the same. Faster and faster.

Yeah, but more of everything. Yeah, more of everything, but faster and faster. Guest Nick Bostrom has this famous thought experiment called the paperclip problem. You talk about it, and I was very, very impressed by the way this is described in the book. Because as astrophysicist, you are an astrophysicist. Your first book was not even about AI or astrophysics, about quantum mechanics. We'll get to that later. Stay tuned.

Those are breadcrumbs for later. But tell us, what are the kind of delusional, or perhaps physics uninformed content hot takes of these billionaires ranging from Elon Musk, who I spoke to very briefly on the podcast a year ago, and people like Nick Bostrom who don't seem to in the so called limits to growth and things that have been around for a very long time. So what are they missing and that we should be getting or lead us to be either less concerned about doom or more optimistic about boom?

The most obvious physics uninformed thing that Elon Musk in particular says is basically everything he ever says about Mars, he's just wrong about Mars. But when it comes to AI stuff, I mean, you've got people like boomers, like Marc Andreessen in particular, saying that AI is going to allow us to transcend all limits to growth and just have permanent growth of everything or, you know, more everything forever, hence the title of the book. And that's just not how physics works, Right? We know that there are limits on everything that are imposed, if not by anything else than ultimately by physics. Right. Entropy and cosmology force there to be limits. There is only so much stuff in the universe. There's only so much energy in the universe. There's only so much free energy in the universe.

Energy that can be, you know, energy in a useful form that can be used to do stuff before it, you know, reaches a state of maximal entropy. Now, some of these people do recognize that Bostrom understands that limit. He understands that there's a limit imposed by entropy and limits imposed by cosmology. His response to that is to say, oh, then we need to go out and collect all of that available free energy before we lose it beyond the cosmic horizon, because otherwise, you know, we'll have lost resources that we could have use to make life better. I think not only does that ignore other kinds of physical and biological and scientific limits, but it also is just a really bizarre and unhealthy response to the fact that we live in a limited universe.

There are those, though, that say that, you know, you're not being optimistic enough, Adam. You're saying things like the past people would speculate we're all going to be eating, you know, soil and green. There's a population explosion. Actually, the problem we should be worried about is overpopulation. Now, it seems like underpopulation according to some people. I take it from the exasperated side that you don't believe in that, but I want to take us back to the influence of science fiction.

Sure.

On all these billionaires. All these. And some are not billionaires. Right. I don't think you. Well, Yudkowski might be a billionaire by now, or he certainly may.

Yudkowski's not a billionaire on the way.

Possibly to being on. But there are many other people in the book that you mentioned that aren't, you know, Vernor Vinge, who was a graduate, proud graduate of UC San Diego, Kim Stanley Robinson. These are not billionaires. They're comfortable. But their visions do inform, you know, a lot of the techno optimistic future. And I am, you know, I wouldn't say friends with Peter Thiel, but we are, you know, we've been in touch in a couple of conferences that, that he's graciously hosted a bunch of thinkers from different, you know, sides of the political aisle. So we say, sure. But the question that I always have is, you know, where.

Where else do we get inspiration if not science fiction? I mean, think about the fact that we're in the Arthur C. Clarke center for Human Imagination, or this is it used to be. We have monoliths on our desk. We have a picture on Your Keating medal for Nobel pursuits in literature that I give to all my wonderful gu. Who come here in person. That's a. That's a request for more in person guests because I love to be in person. But these are people that shape the future through imagination.

And the future was actually outpaced by their imaginations because not one of them had the Internet in 1962.

Right.

And so if they really were soothsayers, they would have caught it. So where should we get our inspiration? And what is wrong with kind of the Star Trek versus Star wars kind of ideological battle that you talk about Peter Thiel kind of suffering with or wrestling with in the book?

I don't want to bash away at science fiction. Right. I am a huge science fiction fan, and I think that clear in the book. Yeah. I was raised on science fiction. I was raised reading Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, you know, Ray Bradbury, all of the greats, Alfred Bester, and then, you know, more recent stuff as well.

Ursula Gwyn was here for this. Yeah, we used to do the. A lot of things with the Speculative Futures and science fiction. She spent a lot of time on this camp campus.

She's one of my favorite writers in any genre. She's amazing. But she also said science fiction authors are not futurists. The job of science fiction is not to predict the future, and that she is a science fiction author and she took on the brave task of trying to speak for all science fiction authors. It's not her job or the job of science fiction to predict the future. And that doesn't mean that science fiction can't be a source of inspiration. It can be. It clearly is.

And sometimes that's a good thing. But it's a question of what we take as inspiration from science fiction and how we see science fiction. Right. Because science fiction is not a roadmap for the future, even if it can serve as a source of inspiration. Right. Because sure, you can look at Star Trek and say, oh, I want those communicators. And now we have stuff that's essentially like the communicators, at least from the original series. But you can also look at Star Trek and say, oh, I want to live in a world where people work together to solve problems in that way.

I want to live in a world where racial inequality is not an issue. I want to live in a world where gender discrimination doesn't exist, especially for the original series of Star Trek and the Next Generation. Star Trek is very, very clearly a kind of morality play. Right? And as I talk about in the book, it's not particularly subtle and that can be a good thing. But you know, like, there are people who watch Star Trek and think, oh, Star Trek's about warp drive. Like, buddy, go back and look at, just to both pick an episode at random and show like the deep level of nerdity that I have and love for Star Trek. There's an episode from the original series, I'm pretty sure it's called Let that Be youe Last Battlefield. And it famously has, I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who played, I think, the Riddler on the original Batman TV series as one of the guest stars, he's got these two guest stars and one of them, half his face is white and half his face is black.

And the other one, this half of his face is black and this half is white. So it's the same but swapped. And one of them claims that the other one is like racially inferior and is chasing him around the galaxy until their planet burns. And this episode aired in 1968 in this country. A year of great, you know, civil strife. Yeah, and, and racial unrest in this country. That episode was not about warp drive. That episode was about the, the dangers of racism and division and, and so, you know, Star Trek and science fiction.

Absolutely. A source of inspiration. But it's a question of, you know. Okay, but what is this actually saying?

Yeah, right. I see now a lot of parallels, ironically between a lot of these techno futurists, techno optimists, who are, as I say, ironically, very secular in most of their practices or lack thereof. Very much either self professed atheist or agnostics at best, so to speak. And then this almost messianic, as I call it, you know, scatological notion of AI is sort of the Godhead figure. And this, this, this notion that it's almost the Messiah that's going to lead us into the promised land. And where is the promised land? It's the great beyond. It's the final frontier. It's space.

Talk about these, these weird parallels that, that are almost religious in, from the characters you mentioned. You know, these, these founding, you know, kind of figures. The, the, the, the prophets and also the apostates, the people that are kind of pushing back on them may have a lot of less financial firepower to go along with it. But talk about the battle between the religious fervor and the cult, almost cult like notions that some of these communities are taking on.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is definitely a parallel here, right. The, the idea that the job of AI companies like OpenAI or Anthropic is to essentially build a God. Right. Some of them actually talk about it as such. In those words, the idea that, you know, the goal is to have that God take us all to space so we can live forever. You know, this is, this, this just looks inextricably like going to heaven to live forever with God. Right.

And, and that parallel, I think is, is not at all a coincidence. Right. If you, if you dive into the historical origins of these ideas of things like transhumanism, things like this, you know, drive to take humanity to space as the next step. A lot of these ideas originally started out as religiously informed ideas, often from Christian movements. You get someone like Nikolai Fedorov saying that it's the common task of humanity to bring about a paradise in space through technology. Back in the late 1800s, you get someone like Teilhard de Chardin saying that you're going to have a self reinforcing cycle of technology leading to humanity having godlike powers and eventually, you know, bringing about a kind of paradise on earth and joining with God. These notions ended up becoming very influential. You know, Fedorov influenced Tsiolkovsky, one of the pioneers of rocketry, and his ideas, his cosmist inflected ideas that came from among other people.

Fedorov ended up influencing Arthur C. Clarke with Tsiolkovsky who said that Earth is the cradle, but you can't stay in the cradle forever. And then it was Clark who wrote Childhood's End. Right.

Book that Infancy's End would have been more appropriate.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The title is a direct reference to that. And, and he even talks about Tsiolkovsky explicitly in a different book, Rendezvous with Rama. It was Terre de Chardin who, you know, first took the word transhumanist and sort of brought it into this context of technological apotheosis, you know, an eschatology of technology. And it was his friend Julian Huxley who grabbed that idea and brought it into a more secular context. But this idea is at its heart, I think, inextricably religious. And I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of these people come from like a lot of the leaders in these communities come from a deeply religious background and then, you know, found atheism.

But now I'm going to get real pretentious and also engage in some really irresponsible, you know, guessing about what's going on in other people's brains. But it's your speculative future. Yeah, exactly. There was a Nietzsche quote that I didn't use in my book, that I thought about using but ultimately couldn't find a way to do it. And it's something like, you know, yeah, God's dead, but we're going to try to find some way of putting something, yeah, putting something into that God shaped hole in our society. Finding something else to call God. And I think this is a lot of that, you know, this is, this is, oh, wouldn't it be nice if there were some omnipotent, omniscient being that could take care of us? And that's not going to happen.

I want to parlay this eventually into a connection between a topic that I, you know, think dovetails nicely. Although you don't mention in the book, but it's impossible for me to imagine you don't have an opinion about alien life and UAPs in the universe. It's not in this book, but the kind of again, eschatological and messianic and cult like behavior and religious fervor and supplement surrogate replacement of God of religion with advanced civilizations that exist that are visiting us to do what? No, who knows what. But do you see parallels there? Is there, you know, between these different communities, these different kind of cult like structures as I see them.

So it's interesting because aliens do show up in the book a little bit. Right. Mostly in that a lot of these people don't believe in them. Right, right. And I don't mean they don't believe aliens have come here and visited us and given us advanced technology. I don't believe that either. These guys don't believe that aliens exist anywhere.

Right. Where.

Yeah, exactly. Like maybe there are bacteria somewhere, but they don't believe that there's anything like, you know, an advanced seti. Yeah, exactly. An alien civilization. And, and it's very interesting that they sort of go out and take that very strong position, which I think is. I don't think that that's true. The argument that they give for it I think is ludicrous. The argument they give is, well, inevitably technological civilization is going to undergo something like a singularity and is going to go out and try to colonize the universe.

And so the fact that we haven't seen any evidence of that, that we haven't seen evidence of Dyson spheres up in the sky that we haven't seen, you know, alien autonomous probes showing up here in our solar system.

Time traveler.

Right. Yeah, exactly. That means that we're alone and therefore the universe is here for the taking. And so I do think that There is something sort of religious about that in the idea that, oh, that means it's our universe. It's here for us.

God so loved us. He gave us his only son, but we're his only son and there's nothing else in the universe.

Exactly, yeah.

And the reason I brought that up is I share a very similar viewpoint. I'm open to it. I don't like to use the word believe, as you did, but. But I say I think there's no evidence, and I think that's basically what you meant. I want to take that in a parallel track right now and talk about kind of the day after Aliens. So if you remember the. The great book and movie Contact by Carl Sagan and his wife, who was past guest on the show. Andrew, Very proud of that.

Had her on way back when I first started. And Freeman Dyson, he was my first guest, by the way.

Amazing. He was a lovely man. I met him when I was in college.

Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's too bad you didn't get to spend more time with him when you were here last. He's no longer with us, as they say. I had a conversation with Lex Friedman about that very scene in Contact where Bill Clinton is. It's a realistic scene. It's not CGI like most of the movie. Bill Clinton's on the White House law and saying, if this discovery of this meteorite. He doesn't say the meteorite, but he says if this discovery of alien, you know, microbes or whatever, if that is proven and verified to be true, that will mark a new dawn for humanity, basically.

And so that was actually true as far as people knew. That was a meteorite discovered in Antarctica that had come from the planet Mars. This is your meteorite for being a guest. This comes from Argentina.

Amazing.

But that meteorite was thought for many years, more than two decades, to be actually harboring signs of extraterrestrial life that originated on Mars. Microbial respiratory byproducts, perhaps, or microbes themselves. And I submit that 99 of the people that did know about that saw the press conference or whatnot. They don't know that that was never verified. In fact, it refuted in some cases.

Right.

And second of all, they haven't changed their opinion on the existence of aliens one bit. In other words, it wasn't a big deal. And. And if you really care about, you know, life in the universe, there's only one example. We can go down to the Pacific Ocean here, scoop up some water, and you get 10 to the. You know, 25th examples of life. And yet we don't seem to be putting as much effort into, you know, the search for protecting life on Earth as we do for searching in life in the universe. Now, yeah, people like Jill Tarter will say that's idiotic statement.

So, but let's, let's turn our astrophysical, you know, eyes to that. The parallels between the. The search out there, because we may be it. That's the part, I think it diverges in the AI and accelerationist and EA community in that they're. They're sort of stipulating we're it.

Yep.

Whereas the alien, you know, maximalists are saying, no, no, no, we can't be it, because as Sagan said, it's an awful waste of space. How do those two things get reconciled? I mean, the notion that life, you know, could be. Should be so abundant, and yet these accelerationists aren't taking as much care of the Earth, at least from the perspective I glean from you in the book, as they could. Or humanity or democracy. So talk about that. How do they over that if this is the only example of life in a universe of 10 to the 23rd possible planets?

It's a good question. They don't see that as the problem. Right. They. They think, oh, this is the only example of life or at least, you know, advanced life in the entire universe. And so therefore it's really, really important. It's more important than anything else that we get off of this planet in order to secure a future out in space. And there's a lot of problems with that.

Right. You know, they say it's more important than anything else. It's more important than preserving the environment here. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than civil rights. They also overlook that space is pretty bad, Right. That for humans to live, this is the best place we've got. And there really isn't anywhere else.

There is no planet B, as the saying goes, right.

Proxima Centauri B.

Right. There's Proxima Centauri B. Yeah. But, yeah, you know, like Musk wants to go to Mars. Mars is terrible. Right.

There's no Wienersmith was on last year. City on Mars basically says it's impossible. And even if it were possible, you point this out in the book too.

I just want to.

Parenthetically, we're not gonna spend much time on it, but yeah, but we. He talks about the fact that, yeah, you might want to go to Mars, but does your great grandson want to be born on Mars? You know. And did you psychologically vet them? No, you didn't because they weren't born when you took off with their future in mind. Anyway, go on.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And Zach and Kelly's book is amazing and I cite it in mine. It's, it's very good book. And yeah, Mars is terrible. There's nowhere in the solar system that we could go to, except right here to like really live and work and build community.

They don't focus. I'm sorry to interrupt, but why do you think they don't focus on the habitable? Known to be habitable. Known to be supporting life. Get life sustaining Places I've been to, you know, at least one of them. The South Pole, you know, which, which is not too dissimilar from where you spent your Ph.D. or Michigan. I was in Wisconsin for part of my time, so I can make fun of that. But the South Pole, you know, there are 45 people there right now in the middle of winter, coming up in the middle of winter for them and, and, or the oceans.

I mean we have 70 of the planet, right? And there's obviously abundant life there even. And there's an almost infinite parameter space of life. Why is there zero? I mean, I know Schmidt, Eric Schmidt has spent some effort on this, but I think it's to get his mega yacht out there and get some tax deductions. I mean, Eric, if you're out there, I'd to like to talk to you, but, but Adam wouldn't because he doesn't think billionaires should exist. But anyway, let's talk about under the ocean and under. On the polar ice caps while they last. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and you do see other things like you know, the Seasteading Institute, people who want to go out there. But like, yeah, by and large there's, there's not nearly as much interest. And I think part of it is just like it doesn't sound as sexy. Yeah, right. Like there's something cool about space that is less cool about like sea labs.

Do you think it's partially militaristic? I mean, what would be a better psyop or better covert op than to say, oh, we're going to get Starlink satellites and blue Origin Kuipers out there. But really it's a cover for weaponizing space.

I mean, I don't think that it's a deliberate psyop. There are certainly people who are interested in weaponizing space and I'm sure they're very comfortable with this way of talking about space as a cover for that. But I don't think that that's what, say, Elon Musk Musk or Jeff Bezos. Like, I don't think that that's what their ultimate goals are. Right. They've been very, very clear that they want to go out into space to, you know, save and secure the future of humanity. You know, this is weird because space is awful, but. But yeah, I mean, it's very, very difficult to understand why anyone would think that space is the inevitable future of humanity when you actually look at how awful it is and how difficult it would be to leave the solar system and go somewhere else where there might be a better, more habitable planet than the ones that aren't Earth here.

But even those planets probably already have their own biospheres. And if they don't, they're still going to be very difficult to live on.

I guess a pushback might be, you know, from an Elon. You know, again, I've talked to him very briefly. His mom kind of bailed him out at the end when I said, which one of your kids, of your 14 kids that we know about are you going to say goodbye to? Or, you know, which ones are going to take with you? Which ones you're gonna say goodbye because they're not all gonna come. And would you wanna bring a three year old to Mars? I don't think that's a very good plan. And his mother just, you know, kind of interrupted the conversation. Let's not talk about unpleasant things, you know, so Mama may, she, she bailed them out. But when, you know, when we think about, you know, kind of the, the ultimate goal in going into space again, it's, it's this theme that runs throughout the book that's so rich is, is long termism.

Yeah.

And that if you don't think that way, you are an obstructionist, you're a decelerationist, you're, you know, a pessimist or what have you. And you trace it in the very beginning of the book to this notion of what, you know, what is called. I think it's very hubristic, if that's a word, to say that they're effective altruists.

Right.

This notion is like the French Enlightenment, you know, calling themselves the Enlightenment as they cut off the heads of Lavier and great general greatest of minds of their generation rolled into a basket, as it was said. Talk about this, the notion that they know better and we should be listening to them because you're not doing effective altruism when you Give, you know, charity, sadaka, you know, tithing or whatever. We're going to tell you how to do it. And it's really just a cover word for code word for we know what's best because we're. We are these superhuman brainiacs. So talk about effective altruism and the repugnant conclusions I claim it has for this movement that may come to dominate technology and democracy.

There are a lot of weird names in this space, right, that sort of have that same flavor, right? There's the effective Altruists. My favorite is the Rationalists. It's like, oh, yeah, we're going to call ourselves like the Correct Ists.

That's right.

You know, there's one of my favorite TV shows is Parks and Rec. And there's this group, this cult on Parks and Rec called the Reasonableists. And I just always think of them when I think of the Rationalists. But, yeah, the effective altruist, you know, it is one of these things that sounds unobjectionable on the face of it, right? Like, oh, we're going to find the most effective ways to do the most good. But. But the devil is always is in the details, right? What do you mean by effective? What do you mean by good? What do you mean by the most good? And this leads you sort of inexorably to this idea, long termism, that, well, if you want to do the most good, you need to help the most people. Where are the most people? Well, they're in the future, right? They're the future generations that will come.

After us, not only separated in space, but separate in time.

Exactly.

A lot more separate in time than in space, Right.

Or there could be at least.

Yeah, 10 to the 20.

Right, exactly. They have these absurd calculations, and that gets to the heart of it, right? Because we don't know what the future holds and we don't know what future people will need. It's very, very hard to make accurate estimations about what generations, even 10 generations down the line, much less 1,000 generations down the line, will need if and when they're scattered across space. And to the effect of altruists, this repugnant conclusion that they come to is this idea that, you know, more people, as long as their lives are at least barely worth living, is always better. Makes the world and the universe a better place. And so this creates what one very prominent effective altruist Will MacAskill, calls a moral case for space settlement. But again, space is terrible. There is no moral case for.

For space settlement. And you can't do that to your descendants. Right. But there's also the bigger problem of like, why, why is that what they want? Why do they think that a better world is just one that has more people, you know, almost no matter what? I think a smaller population living happier lives is better. And this is like a well known paradox in philosophy that, you know, people have sort of bashed their heads against for years. And there's a reason that it's, you know, a paradox. It's very difficult to sort of assign utility function. Yeah, exactly.

They attempt to bring their, their, you know, engineering kind of credentials to it.

Right, yeah. It's this idea that you can quantify absolutely everything. And I just don't believe that that's true. Right. Like if you want to defend this, then you got to have this way of determining like, okay, what is good and what is good across an entire population. How do you evaluate different kinds of happiness within one person and then across different people, across all populations, across all generations, literally until the heat death of the universe? If you have a way that you think of doing that, that you think works even in principle, I'm just not going to believe you.

I see it as kind of an analog of the Drake equation, which is highly speculative and filled with errors and the biggest errors, that there's no errors assigned to any of the terms in the equation. And so it becomes just a framework, but so forth. And then people use it and they make these calculations of similar types of figures as 20. As Adam Frank, another past Adam astrophysicist has said on the show, you know, there could be 20, you know, 10 to the 24th Avogadro's number of planets. Right, sure, okay. In the history of the observable universe, okay. I care about those within 100 light years of me. Right.

So we can at least plausibly have communicated once, at least one direction. But, but there are these parallels and I think that again it's, there is a, there's this, this chord of escapism. I can't help thinking, you know, I'm an, you know, I call myself a devout practicing agnostic, you know, where I think a scientist could be open to, you know, being swayed, but never should say that they believe in something without evidence. I think that's problematic for a scientist to say. And nevertheless, you know, to be open, to be completely closed off to it. I find as a per. In my personal life, with my children, my family, to be more infused with meaning, so to speak. So I practice.

But, you know, the level of which belief comes in is. Is another matter. But these people, I think they are trying to replace this, you know, either God sized hole or something that's missing in their life. And that's now we could psychoanalyze. I don't think that's important, but I do think it's, it's interesting to consider, you know. So Mark Andreessen follows me on Ax Twitter, where you are rarely seen nowadays. I've tried to post to you, but you're protected and blocked.

Oh, sorry.

Everything else, but that's all good. We can find you on Blue Sky. Yes, or Master. Have you been to Mastodon?

I have, although it's a little quieter. I'm mostly using Blue sky these days.

You know, Mark Andreessen, if I had to channel him, I might think that he would say something like, like, look, you know, Becker, you're one of the most, you're in the elite of the elite, 0.1001% of the population, educated western institutions conversant with technology, the finest education, background, pedigree. You're living this comfortable life. And so you're criticizing the very people that deliver, you know, in his case, developing, you know, Netscape, Mozilla, leading to the, at least the commercialization, popularization which led to his great wealth, by the way of the Internet, you know, through the World Wide Web browser, which was, you know, but we can talk about its origins. But, but what would you say to him? He might criticize this. I mean, he comes off as if there is a villain, there's not really a villain, but he comes off kind of the most, the most deserving of the most appropriate. At least as you, as you dish it out in the book. Teals kind of musk is a very, very close second. Maybe, maybe tops.

Who knows? You'll have to say. But what would he say about this, this, you know, critique? I mean, if we could channel him. Steel man, his argument, look how much it's given you. I mean, you personally, I mean, you flew down here on an airline. You know, you'll stay in a chain hotel. You'll eat the finest and deliver technology. We communicated via email over the web. You publish in a major publishing house book.

I listened to it in audio, Reddit and print. These are all things done, Bezos. And we can talk about Google and the Brins and the Pages, et cetera, but talk about what they'll say. You're now kind of coming down with this harsh critique of the very abundant future which you were given. You say in the book they didn't earn it completely, they might say the same to you. How would you react to that?

I think like any good millennial, there are some Internet memes that just live in my head rent free and probably just will forever. Right. And the one that's coming to mind right now is this sort of one panel cartoon of, like, a medieval looking peasant doing backbreaking labor and, you know, like, literally hunched over with like, a big pile of wood on their back in a cap covered in mud, saying, we should improve society somewhat. And then over on the side of the panel, someone dressed in, like, modern clothing is sort of sticking their head up out of a well, saying, ah, but you participate in society. Curious. I am very smart.

Kind of the human version of the meme where the wolves come upon a campfire and they say, oh, we should really investigate that campfire to themselves. And then fast forward 10,000 years and there's a teacup poodle inside of Paris Hilton's. So it's the human version of that kind of.

Yeah. It is actually absolutely true that I participate in society, right? And that this is a society shaped in large part by the decisions made by the tech billionaires that I criticize in the book. The fact that I participate in that society and have benefited from various things in that society does not mean that I don't get to criticize it. Right? It means that I should be aware of the ways in which I have benefited from living in this society. And I ask, you know, I know that I have been very lucky. I was lucky to be born to the parents that I was born to. I was lucky to be able to go to the schools that I went to. I was lucky to get my first book deal and my second book deal.

That doesn't mean that everything is great. Right? Just because I have been able to benefit from certain things in society doesn't mean that, you know, therefore I cannot possibly criticize society. It just means, like, there are, you know, there are problems. And I think it would be better if we addressed those problems and would addressing some of those problems possibly make my life a little bit worse than it is right now. Maybe that's possible. I'm okay with that because I think that it would be better if we lived in a more just world where more people had the chance to, you know, not even live the kind of life that the billionaires live, but just the kind of life that I live. Because, you know, one of the things I thought about doing before the book came out was I thought about making a bingo card of different reactions. I figured I would get to the book and one of the reactions I knew would show up in an Internet forum somewhere.

And I want to be really clear, this is not what you're saying. It's not even what you're saying Marc Andreessen would say. Right. But one of the criticisms I knew would show up somewhere was, oh, you know, Becker's just trying to profit off of, you know, these, these crazy things that these people say. He's just a grifter. And like, buddy, if you say that, you have no idea how book publishing works. Like, this is not a money making endeavor for me.

Broke slowly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was just talking with someone last night and said, oh, yeah, after I did my PhD, I went into science journalism because I thought, you know what? Academics make too much money. I want to do something that makes less money than that.

Too spoiled by riches.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I am fully open to and have accepted that. Yeah, absolutely. I have benefited from living in the society that we live in. That doesn't mean that I don't get to say, hey, I think we should change this. I think it'd be better if this were different.

Yeah. And it's a very different book than the other books that I've read or, you know, participated in. Max Tegmark obviously is a, is sort of a doomer, as people call him, and gets criticized for that. And then Yann Lecun and I had them battling each other. It's pretty funny to watch them, you know, at least by remotely, by text message. But at the end of the day, you know, know what really feeds this I see as sort of a cycle, you know, where you've got these, you know, tech unicorns that fuel, you know, kind of this epistemic, you know, kind of conceit that they have solved something and are worth a billion dollars. So they should be. They're really smart.

Right. So we should listen to whatever they say. And then that includes extracting, you know, both resources, monetary resources, but also political power from which is possible in a democracy. And I see this loop or, you know, could be a doom loop. But I want to ask you kind of a flip side of that. What are you optimistic about in this future? I mean, AI has transformed the. I do research the way I teach. Has it done as much as the Internet? You know, as I think Cho Enlist said about the French Revolution, 1972, it's too soon to tell.

You know, like, will it, will it, you know, really supersede? But you Know, Yeah, we're just at the very nascent beginning of it where, you know, we haven't even brought in my autonomous robot, you know, to replace my, my job as a professor. Yeah, but what are you optimistic about? It could be an education. I mean, you're, you're very familiar conversion with educational systems. And what are you optimistic about the AI that's not doom related, that you're, that you actually think is going to be a net benefit, both, not necessarily of the people in the book. You can compliment them all you like. But what are you optimistic about in terms of, you know, both education, economics and, and perhaps, you know, more broadly, you know, kind of technology in the future?

I'm going to go for the last part of that first. Right. Like, I think that there's all sorts of wonderful things to be optimistic about regarding technology in general. Right. I have a cousin who's a cancer researcher and there have been amazing leaps and bounds in cancer research in the last decade due to this sort of new direction of cancer research having to do with getting cancer patients own immune systems to learn how to fight the cancers that they have. I'm very optimistic about that because I've talked with my cousin and other experts on this and came to the conclusion like, yeah, this sounds really great. Or rather they came to that conclusion and convinced me, you know, because they know what they're talking about. That sounds amazing.

You know, I think. I don't want to say it looks like the cure to cancer is within reach because I don't know about that, but like. But we're definitely going to be able to treat cancers that were previously untreatable and are already able to do that. That's amazing. Right? That's really great. I think that there's amazing applications for MRNA vaccines. Right. They're not just for Covid.

I think that, you know, it's in a way too soon to tell what's going to happen with that, but it's looking pretty good. So, yeah, all sorts of amazing biomedical advances. I am optimistic about green technology. You know, it's just been getting cheaper and cheaper. That's amazing. I think that if we decide as a civilization that we are finally ready to make that transition to renewable energy as a primary energy source, that's just way more possible than it was even 10 years ago. Yeah, right. That's incredible.

You know, I am still really, really worried about global warming, but it makes me less concerned about us having the tools, the technological tools that we need to address it now that we have most of Them it's primarily a political and social problem rather than a technological one. One. And that's great. There's any number of other things that I'm optimistic about regarding technology and the way that it can be applied. AI, these machine learning tools that we have now, there are all sorts of wonderful applications. This isn't generative AI, which I'll get to in a second, but I didn't use any generative AI in the writing of either of my books. Except for one paragraph in the new book where I say here is a thing that I got ChatGPT to say, right? Where very clearly that's generative AI. The rest of it it is not.

Right? So unless I'm quoting ChatGPT, it's all me, but non generative AI. Right. Like audio transcription. It's incredible. You know, as a journalist, I use that quite a bit because it's really, really helpful to have a first pass at a transcript of what somebody said to me. And is the transcript perfect? No. Is it ever going to be perfect? I don't know, maybe there's a lot of different ways that people speak, but it doesn't need to be. I just need to be able to get a few keywords so I can find the spot in the hour long transcript where they say the one thing that I that summarizes the thing they spent the last 20 minutes saying.

And so I can use that in the article or the book or whatever it is that I'm writing. It's incredibly useful for that and has made it much easier for me to do my job. Although that is also an example of somebody losing a job because of AI. Right. I previously hired someone for my first book. I hired a dear friend of mine who was looking for work. I said, well, look, you know, know I have this grant to work on this book. I can give you some of that money if you transcribe these interviews.

And so she did that for the new book. I didn't have to do that, I just had to sign up for the subscription, which was even cheaper. But nonetheless, you know, like as with most other technologies. Yeah, okay, some jobs go away, but then new jobs are created. Right. And I think a lot of we're going to see a lot of that with AI. Generative AI is a trickier case, right. Because there are costs there that don't exist in the same way or at least at the same scale as there are in other AI systems.

Right. There's environmental costs, right? The carbon cost, the cost of the water that's being used to cool the systems, the resources that are extracted in order to build the systems in the first place. There's the intellectual property that was used in ways that are allegedly theft to train these systems. Right. And I find it quite rich that you get people like Sam Altman or Nick Clegg saying, oh, but you know, but if we had to pay for the intellectual property rights, then these AI systems wouldn't be profitable. I'm like, okay, two things. First of all, they're still not profitable. Like OpenAI's never turned a profit.

And second, yeah, that's a problem, but not the way that you think it is. It means that these systems, you should have maybe talked to somebody before building these things. And then there's also the human cost, the labor that's being exploited to train these systems out of producing dangerous content, which first of all, it's not, you know, even completely successful. Right. You can still get these systems to produce dangerous content or content that looks dangerous and, and by virtue of looking dangerous becomes dangerous. Like, you know, giving you instructions for what it claims is like a medicine, but instead if you take it, you know, it'll poison you or something like that, but, or you know, fake bomb making instructions that will blow up in your face if you try to build them or something like that. But you know, they trained it out of, or tried to train it out of producing like child sexual material, which is very important for them to train it out of doing because they can't have it put it out on the Internet. But in order to do that, they had to hire people at very, very low wages, usually in the developing world to be exposed to some of the very, very worst of the worst of what the Internet can produce.

Because these things speak with kind of the smeared out averaged voice of the Internet. And so if you ask them to do horrible things, they will produce things a lot like the worst things that anyone's ever put on the Internet. And it's caused real psychological trauma for the people who've done this. Karen Howe, who has a great new book out called Empire of AI, she documented this really, really well, I believe in her new book, which I haven't read, but also definitely in her reporting for the Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review and whatnot. These are real human costs. And if you want to have these systems out on the Internet without having them produce easily such content, either you need to not have them on the Internet or you need to harm these workers. And the choice that these companies have made is to harm these workers and so with all of those harms. And this is also putting aside the harms that, that are coming from the people using these systems.

Right. The AI induced psychosis cases that are being seen and, and the. Yeah, exactly. And the deskilling that, that people are, are like undergoing as they, as they rely on it more and more to do things that they themselves used to do. Even putting those things aside, it makes it very hard for me to say that it's okay to use these generative AI systems or at least to use them widely because it's, it's really, it's really like very hard to defend ethically what These companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have had to do along the way to produce.

You left out Llama and you know, Meta's products, which are open source.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

Less problematic.

I'm not sure that they are.

Are.

I know less about them and that's why I left them out. I know that at the very least they probably had to train on, you know, similar corpuses of intellectual property and probably using similar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I, I am skeptical that they're okay. I don't, I don't know as much about them.

Well, one of our favorite traditions on this podcast is to do what you're not supposed to do, which is to pass judgment. Judgment on a book by solely looking at its cover. So we call this judging books by its cover. We even have a little jingle, which we'll start now.

Hey, book lovers, we're judging books by the covers.

We know we're not supposed to do.

It, but into the impossible. There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books.

So Adam, what we'd like to do is have an author take us through the title, the subtitle.

Yep.

And the beautiful you're not known for. That's the only shortcoming. I'll save the book. So walk us through the title, subtitle and the. And the. At least the stellar background on this book. And then next episode we'll talk about this one.

The title of the book, More Everything Forever is sort of what came first out of all the things on the COVID aside from my own name, which I was not responsible in the choosing of my name. But so about halfway through the time that I spent working on the book, it sort of pivoted to being about something a little different than it had been about when. And I initially suggested it to my publisher. And they took the proposal and gave me a book deal. And when I made that Change a lot of things that had been floating around in my head that I knew had to go into the book, but I wasn't sure how to make them go in. The book just kind of clicked and fell into place, and I found myself finally writing a draft that I liked of a chapter that ultimately ended up becoming chapter one of the book. And not very far into that chapter, I realized, oh, you know what would make a good title for this book is More comma Forever. And so originally that was the title.

And then I finished writing a very early, very rough draft of chapter one, and then sent it to a dear friend of mine who's also a writer and said, hey, what do you think of this? I think this is where I'm taking the book. And I'd already sent that to my editor. My editor liked it, but this friend of mine is one of the very few people I was also showing drafts of the week work to at various points. And he read it and he said, I think this is great. Obviously, it's an early draft and it needs some work. I also think your title isn't More Forever. I think your title is More Everything Forever. And I said, oh, damn it, you're right.

It's like Facebook was originally the Facebook.

Right, exactly.

From the Social Network.

Exactly. Yeah. I was like that. I just. I saw, you know, I saw what he said and like, oh, damn, that's right. Isn't it good? No, it's very good.

That feedback earlier.

Yeah, absolutely. And so I took that to my editor and he said, oh, yeah, that's just absolutely correct. And so we had the title, and then the subtitle we knew had to involve AI and space because the title of the book is good, but it doesn't really give you a sense of, like, what the book's about.

Right.

And so, you know, we kicked around a few different ideas for a while, and then finally, once we had a fully, like, finished and, you know, know, stable draft of the book, once I'd. I'd finished that, I sat down with my publisher and then, well, yeah, with my editor, and then his boss, the publisher, and ultimately, you know, kicked around a few ideas. And then finally we said, okay, let's do this one more time. And one of the first things that I think I was the one who wrote it down and not one of them, but I'd have to go back and confirm was this subtitle. And. And my editor's boss saw it, and she said, yeah, that's it.

You received the most prized possession in all of San Diego county, which is to get the Keating Medal. Now, this is loosely modeled on the Nobel Prize. And in the book you talk about the repository for germinal choice, although you call it by its more common name, the Nobel Prize sperm bank.

Yes.

Which was actually here in Escondido, which is north San Diego County. Yeah, we can go take a, you know, make a deposit. No, I'm just kidding. We don't have the Nobel Prize, where. So it's actually shutdown. So this was actually developed in part by, by many of the kind of Silicon Valley Nobel laureates, including William Shockley, who had reportedly had the maybe distinction or maybe humiliation of being ranked one of the lower IQ candidates that won the Nobel Prize, but nevertheless, he did win the Nobel Prize. So we have to give to him. But he was a big proponent of eugenics.

And, and many of the people that were early pioneers were at least eugenics adjacent, shall we say. How is AI, you know, perhaps impacting underrepresented communities, racism, you know, playing into it? Is that just amplifying what's latent in society, or is it something that's generative in the worst possible sense of the word?

I think it's a little of both. It's definitely amplifying stuff that's already there. Right. It's taking these existing biases and just, you know, making it possible to automate them because it just takes existing data which, you know, reflects these biases and then says, oh, okay, I guess that's, you know, if that's the goal, then this is what we're going to do. And that's not even restricted to generative AI. That's something you'll see in almost any machine learning system that's been trained on human behavior. Right. But there's also sort of a deeper philosophical tie as well, which I talk about in the book, which is the idea that intelligence is this single number that you can sort of dial up or dial down.

Down is historically something that is strongly associated with eugenics. Right. Even IQ testing is strongly associated with eugenics. It's part of why the IQ test was developed. And so it's not particularly surprising to see that in communities that have formed around the idea of AI and super intelligent AI, where you just dial that knob all the way to the right, that there's not just this sort of, of historical philosophical connection with eugenics, but that a fair number of people in these communities actually advocate for various forms of eugenics. Right. And this is something like I said, I talk about this in the book. There are people in the effective altruist and rationalist communities, which is where a lot of this modern thinking about AI and AGI came from, who are very comfortable and advocates for a kind of racist pseudoscience called human biodiversity, which is something I went and talked with a fair number of geneticists and I think it's the longest endnote in the book, actually it's two or three pages long, where I talked with them and they said oh yeah, that's nonsense, that is not science.

And yet there are full throated defenses of it made by some prominent people in these communities. And I don't think it's a coincidence.